The Government may finally be putting its money where its mouth is about getting parents involved in their children's learning. Simon Vevers reports
Finding ways to engage parents in their children's learning in the most disadvantaged communities has long been regarded as one of the toughest, but most important, issues to crack for Government, local authorities and practitioners. While they have rightly been labelled as their children's primary educators, many parents have felt powerless to influence their children's education and past efforts to involve them often have lacked focus or have been viewed as patronising.
Parents' reluctance to get involved in their children's education has generally been attributed to their own unpleasant experiences at school where, in the words of one early years expert, they may have been 'humiliated and knocked back'.
However, a fresh initiative involving 41 local authorities in a range of pilots through the Parents as Partners in Early Learning (PPEL) programme is generating optimism, with a sense that the Government has finally grasped that involving parents in children's learning must entail a creative alliance between the parent and the practitioner or setting.
Crucially, the issue has been given prominence in the Early Years Foundation Stage, with a key section on Positive Relationships: Effective Practice: Parents as Partners. It insists that since children spend more than 70 per cent of their time out of early years settings, parents and the community must be regarded as 'significant learning environments in the lives of children'.
Under the £9m programme, Birmingham, with £500,000, and Lancashire and Bradford, with £350,000 each, receive the largest allocations. Proposals submitted by local authorities include giving parents of nought to five-year-olds learning diaries and albums so they can discuss their progress with professionals.
Other plans include helping parents use music and singing to encourage children to speak and listen, creating personal education plans for fostered children, and engaging fathers and granddads by recording them reading stories and organising gardening activities.
Sustainable schemes
The DfES says the money will be used to provide training and support for early years staff in working with the most disadvantaged families, and increase capacity to develop sustainable programmes such as parental involvement networks and volunteer schemes. It will also help develop outreach programmes in partnership with voluntary and community groups.
Margy Whalley, director of research, training and development at the Pen Green Centre, is an enthusiastic supporter of the PPEL project and looks forward to working with local authorities in developing initiatives. She also believes that it signals a significant and long-overdue shift in Government approaches to engaging parents.
She argues that the academic Chris Athey's groundbreaking work on the issue in the 1970s was never taken forward and practitioners, until recently, were left 'floundering in the dark', as there were 'a range of parenting programmes without much focus on the specific involvement of parents in children's learning'.
Now, she believes, the Government is clearer about the issues at stake. 'When you want to change children's life chances, it's got to be much more of a focused intervention which isn't about teaching parents parenting skills, it's about sharing knowledge about child development with parents.
'It's important that the Government has stopped generalising about working with parents and is beginning to recognise that parents have a lot of knowledge. We need a shared vocabulary for describing what children are doing, not a set of skills to impose on parents.'
Bucking the trend
The importance of creatively bringing together the knowledge of children of both practitioners and parents was spelled out in a 2006 working paper for the Department of Work and Pensions by Professor Patrick Easen of the University of Northumbria. In Bucking the trend: What enables those who are disadvantaged in childhood to succeed later in life?, he states, 'The roles of professional experience and parents' everyday experience are seen as complementary but equally important. The former constitutes a "public" (and generalised) form of "theory" about child development, while the latter represents a "personal theory" about the development of a particular child... Only through the combination of both types of information could a broad and accurate picture be built up of a child's developmental progress.'
Early years specialists believe all parents can engage in this dialogue. The DfES refers to engaging 'hard to reach' parents, but Lesley Staggs, former Foundation Stage director and now independent consultant, says, 'Actually, I don't think they are hard to reach, it's just that we are not very good at it' (see box).
It is a view shared by Margy Whalley, who says, 'I don't think there is such a thing as a "hard to reach" parent. I think there are services that are hard to engage with, and I have never met a parent who doesn't want more for their children than they had.'
She adds, 'Only professionals who are secure in their own practice can engage with parents. The more competent and capable the early childhood field becomes, the more likely we are to engage in an authentic dialogue with parents and not patronise them by being the professional who "knows", talking to the parent who "doesn't".'
PPEL projects
Birmingham
Birmingham head of early years and childcare Lesley Adams says the city council is planning to target children and parents in five wards where communication, language and literacy and personal, social and educational outcomes are 'not as good as they might be'. Another target group will be families living in temporary accommodation across the city.
The council plans to extend its existing Tuning In to Babies programme to older children to help parents and practitioners understand the value of communicating. The PPEL project will also draw on the best practice of some of the city's 1,000 childminders in working effectively with parents. 'Many of them are hugely skilful and work with a range of age groups and are linked into our children's centres,' says Lesley Adams.
Derbyshire
Derbyshire County Council is using its £250,000 grant under the PPEL programme to focus on the nought to three age group in parent and toddler groups based in and around Phase 1 children's centres. It involves an heuristic play project in which parents will be able to access treasure baskets to help them play with their children either in the settings or at home.
Early years manager Penny Akehurst says, 'Hopefully, the project will give parents more confidence to interact with their children, feel comfortable about play and understand more about their child's development and the next steps.'
She adds that involving parents in this way could help to ease any anxieties they have about their child's transition between settings.
Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire children's centres support officer Fran Lee says the county council wants all its children's centres staff to have training in the importance of early language. Emphasis will be placed on reinforcing the role of speech and language therapists, and universal preventative work.
Health visitors who have delivered books to families under the Bookstart programme during the first two years will now be joined in the first year by children's centre staff. They will invite parents to children's centre activities where their needs can be assessed by a family support worker, while a health visitor will look at a child's language development as part of other developmental checks.
Fran Lee says the £200,000 PPEL grant will also help identify families who are not accessing their free nursery entitlement.
Tower Hamlets
In Tower Hamlets, the £300,000 PPEL grant will be targeted mainly at parents of boys, to show them how important active and outdoor learning is to their language and emotional development.
Lesley Staggs, former national Foundation Stage director and now an independent consultant, is working with this London council on its PPEL project. She says, 'We have known for a very long time, and more and more research has shown it, that getting parents involved in their children's learning is going to make the biggest difference to children's life chances.'
She says it is vital that the benefits of the one-year pilot are not lost. 'We are doing everything to ensure that the learning is sustainable, so we are looking to second some of our experienced nursery nurses to do some of the work, because it's a good recognition of their skills and what they can bring to the programme. It will mean that all the learning from this is kept within schools and settings, and we are linking it with work going on in children's centres to mainstream it,' she adds.
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